GSuite: Allowing users to publish files to the web (link sharing)

Google's commercial product, GSuite, allows a lot of control over what end users can do. For example, unlike in Google's free offering, it's possible to restrict how a user can share a file, and that's what this post discusses.

Two of Google's most powerful features is the ease of sharing documents and collaboration. Files can be shared within the organisation or, optionally, to anyone on the public Internet. Organisations may choose to disable public Internet link sharing, in which case users will be missing the two top highlighted options below.

All link sharing options, showing the two we're interested in gaining.

It may be appropriate to allow this for some of your users. Go to your Google admin panel and choose Apps then GSuite followed by Drive and Docs. Click Sharing Settings and you'll see a section entitled sharing outside of <your organisation name>, e.g. sharing outside of Jonsdocs Limited.

You can limit this to a particular GSuite OU by selecting it from the left hand side before clicking Sharing Settings. To apply this setting only to a particular subset of users, you'd need to move them in to that OU.

The setting inside GSuite that gives access to the two link sharing options.

To permit users to share outside of the organisation you need to tick the option allow users in <OU name> to publish files on the web or make them visible to the world as public or unlisted files. Once that's ticked it will apply to your users, which Google warn could take hours.

Should I share files like this?

Ultimately that's a decision for the business as your data is at greater risk when these sharing options are enabled. If necessary to share files like this, I strongly recommend sharing them for as short a time as possible.